The board is an ATmega328 Arduino clone. Instead of an FTDI chip for USB this one is sporting an ATmega8u2. That’s not too much of a surprise as it should translate to a cost savings. [Arclight] reports that the stock firmware flashes a message in Morse code. It seems the Harford HackerSpace got their Bullduino several days ago and already decoded the message. It reads:

“Wouldn’t lou prefer a good game of chess?”

The guys that did the decoding speculate that this could be a type as ‘l’ and ‘y’ are inversions of each other in Morse code; or it could be some kind of clue. At any rate, if you want to do some disassembly and see if there’s anything lurking in the firmware, [Arclight] posted FLASH and EEPROM dumps from both ATmega chips along with his article.

I’m a member of the Harford Hackerspace. From talking with other groups we noticed there seem to be at least two different variations. One is this one and the other is one that has a simon shield that rickrolls you.

Ah, my bad, I didn’t read the post thoroughly. Yeah the Atmega8U2 is the USB controller. I don’t see how that would be cheaper than an FTDI chip. The best route might have been to use an AT90USB which has native usb and has arduino support (see Leonardo)

The Atmega8u2 AFAIK is used on more recent Arduino boards instead of the FTDI chip as a CDC class USB Serial converter. It certainly is cheaper than the FTDI, and is more flexible in that you can update it, or re-purpose it.

Joshua: Shall we play a game?
David Lightman: Oh!
Jennifer Mack: I think it missed him.
David Lightman: Yeah. Weird isn’t it? Love to. How about Global Thermonuclear War?
Joshua: Wouldn’t you prefer a good game of chess?

So I spent some time doing a pinout only to find, yeah it is like the Arduino Uno like it says in the link above :-/. When AVR Studio finishes installing I’ll see if I can do something cool with this thing.

so we checked out the Morse code on the Bullduino that got sent to 23b. It is in fact the same message. Curiously, it uses an apostrophe character, which is not common for human users. Most likely, the code was generated by an automated tool. Could also account for the error?

I have had mine for a couple of days now. Just set your IDE to uno and it works normal. My biggest complaint is the pins are not labeled. They mach the uno but with out reference you can slip up. I made a minor mistake and toasted the VCC input pin, tho the large solder pad works fine. As for the look, I am putting the board front and center.